Harvard’s BIDMC Panel: Compassion Cannot Choose | Sadhguru Center for a Conscious Planet

Bala: Greetings everybody. Namaskaram, namaste. Welcome to this inaugural educational webinar on "Compassion Cannot Choose Healthcare Disparities" from the Sadhguru Center for a Conscious Planet, enhancing consciousness, cognition and compassion. Recently established at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching, clinical and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Boston Massachusetts, USA. Inspired by the scientific discoveries that happens on most of the everyday basis in Harvard and also from the spiritual and humanitarian work where one of the foremost authorities of ancient yogic sciences, Sadhguru, this center was started. Both components I think are essential for us – both spiritual as well as scientific component. The incremental scientific approach and the clarity and attention from the spiritual approach that I get is invaluable. Namaskaram Sadhguru. Sadhguru: Good morning to all of you (Laughs). Bala: Thank you Sadhguru, thank you for joining. It's my fortune and privilege to have Sadhguru, a yogi, mystic and visionary, and stellar group of compassionate speakers from diverse group of their professional interests. We have Dr. Nancy Oriol. She is an asso… faculty associate dean at Harvard Medical School. Welcome, Nancy. Sadhguru: Good morning Ma’am. Bala: We have Dr. James O'Connell. He's an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and is importantly President of the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program. Sadhguru: Namaskaram James. Bala: We have Tiokasin Ghosthorse who is an indigenous elder. Welcome Tiokasin. Sadhguru: Tiokasin. Bala: And we have Victor Lopez Anthony Carmen. He's from Harvard Medical School. He's also a Native American. Welcome, Victor. Sadhguru: Mhmm. Namaskaram to you. Bala: Since all of you are getting exposed to Sadhguru's humanitarian work and also spiritual work for the first time or maybe shortly in the last week or so, I thought I contextualize by playing a short video of his four decades of work. That doesn't do really any justice but this gives you a little bit of context for… for a very nice discussion and talk to follow. Can you play the video please? (Video on Sadhguru plays) Bala: Thank you for the video and thank you all for joining us and thank you Sadhguru. Can I go ahead? Sadhguru: Please. Bala: So we'll start with Dr. Nancy Oriol. And she's my senior colleague and I've known her for almost twenty years. I think she's one of the most compassionate person I've ever seen. The common theme for today is compassion I think, and all of you are in one way or the other have contributed to the society. Nancy Oriol, she's a faculty associate dean, and she is mostly involved in integrating learning into the Harvard Medical School curriculum, providing pragmatic immersive learning experiences for students, while meeting the societal needs of the local community and fostering mutual respect, understanding and benefit. I hear that this is a favorite rotation for medical students, and they really go ahead and do it. An educator, she's a mentor and connector. She creates a curriculum and advises students as they gain skills towards becoming future providers who apply knowledge of how societal differences and racial equity affect the health. This is an important lesson that many of us don't learn. Her community based work began thirty years ago, when in partnership with Boston communities she created the Family Van. Like we saw in that short video of mobile health clinic, she has started this similar van in almost thirty… thirty years ago. This program continues today and our research on this model of care showing that it builds trust, saves lives and saves money, has prompted widespread national adoption. She graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1979. She completed residency at (Sounds like – my?) hospital, and she was the first one in almost eighties, I think, to invent walking epidural. That is giving pain relief to women in labor, but also they are… they were walking; they're not just bound to one… bound to the bed. It was really revolutionizing then and it's adopted by many, many hospitals now. She's an innovator; she invented two medical devices, NeoVac meconium suction catheter, and also, to identify when the fetus is in distress by using their heart rates. From 1997 to 2016 as Dean for Students at Harvard Medical School, one of her educational innovations was introducing mannequin simulation. So, this is a… this is an inspiring field that she does. It's called the HMS Med Science program, and she inspires the high school students to… towards the biology courses, and it's a very innovative way of learning. So let's just look at a video of the Family Van for Nancy Oriol, please. Sadhguru: Hmm, _____ (Unclear) (Laughs)? Bala: Can you play the video? (Video on The Family Van plays) Sadhguru: Ah, wonderful (Laughs). Bala: That's impressive Nancy. Thank you for doing this. And I wanted to start off with you. You know as an anesthesiologist, you look at one patient at a time. What inspired you to take to this almost three decades ago? Nancy Oriol: Well, Bala, thank you for that introduction. Sadhguru, thank you for bringing us together. That's a great question. People often ask why, you know as an anesthesiologist why did I start focusing on the streets? And, to be quite honest, there was a moment where I was compelled to do it. So I was an obstetric anesthesiologist, and on one particular day, I was called to the operating room to do a stat cesarean section on a woman who was rushed in, she was unconscious and her baby was in severe distress. You know the surgery went well, the baby survived, the mother survived, and afterwards I wanted to go and meet the mother to find out what had happened. So, you know, after she regained consciousness, I went to see her. And she was from a local community in Boston. She was from, you know, what you call working poor family. She had health insurance and she had prenatal care. But once she started having a headache, she didn't know that that was a dangerous sign for pregnant women, and she didn't want to bother her doctor with something so trivial, and she didn't want to feel stupid. So she stayed home, developed toxemia, and had a seizure. As I was talking to her, I realized, you know, it was knowledge and self-confidence that had almost caused her baby's death. So I partnered with a medical student, a third year medical student, because I didn't know what the answer was. I didn't know how to solve that problem. I knew the issue was self-confidence and knowledge and access to resources, but I didn't know how to solve that. So, and not being trained in public health, I went to the people who I wanted to serve and basically spent two years with Cheryl Dorsey going to barber shops and churches and mosques and grocery stores and sitting on the corner and just asking people how to solve this problem. And out of that the Family Van was born. Well, the Fa